Consumer purchases are an important part of today's economy. Numerous options are available to consumers regarding how one conducts and pays for daily purchases, such as traditional stores, catalogs, internet websites, and other providers. The average person uses some or all of these options for making purchases, often in a single day. When shopping activity is at a peak, a consumer can spend an inordinate amount of time making purchases, and an even longer time trying to account for and organize all of the receipts and invoices. Organizing one's finances can be difficult, particularly when the process involves dealing with an overwhelming array of receipts and invoices with vastly different formats, methods of delivery, billing cycles, and payment authorization processes.
On the other end of the spectrum, many consumers simply want to buy a single item from a website. However, in order to finish the purchasing process a consumer may be required to navigate numerous user interfaces and security hurdles to provide authentication and purchase information.
Most consumers today carry or have access to one or more computing devices (e.g., desktop computer, laptop computer, a mobile phone, personal digital assistant, a multimedia device, a compact computer, digital music player, a credit card terminal, and/or other portable electronic equipment). These computing devices are capable of increasingly complex functions, including wireless communication, image and computational processing, and/or storage of data. Even the user interfaces of most mobile computing devices can be modified to allow simple functions using both hard and soft keys (i.e., a button, located alongside a display device, which performs a function dependent on the text shown near it at that moment on the display). The local memory capability of these devices allows users to access the Internet via a browser application and maintain electronic records relevant to all aspects of consumer life.